Louis August Wollenweber


Louis August Wollenweber was a German-American German-language journalist and a writer of prose and poetry in Pennsylvania Dutch.

Biography

Germany

As he was orphaned early in life, he was compelled to give up any hope for higher education. He was educated at Speyer for the trade of a printer. Upon the completion of his term of apprenticeship, he traveled through Germany as a journeyman worker, finally settling in Homburg and working for the Deutsche Tribüne. He was compelled to emigrate to the United States, via France and the Netherlands, in consequence of his being one of the agitators of the "Hambacher Volksfest." The journal he was working on was suppressed by the German Diet as well.

Pennsylvania

After his arrival in Philadelphia, he was first engaged on J. G. Wesselhöft's Schnellpost. He later founded a new German-language paper, Der Freimuethige, which lasted only for a short time. He subsequently acquired possession of the Demokrat, the chief German-language newspaper in Philadelphia. In 1853 he sold the Demokrat to his brother-in-law, John S. Hoffman, and afterward resided in the Lebanon Valley and in Reading. Here he was a frequent correspondent of the German newspapers, and wrote much. He wrote chiefly in Hochdeutsch, but also did some pieces in Pennsylvania German dialect.
He loved the Pennsylvania-Germans and their dialect, and they were glad for his book. He was probably the only one of the 19th-century immigrants who deliberately wanted to be counted as a Pennsylvania German, and tried to speak and write, or thought he was speaking and writing, their idiom.

Works